Find the Perfect Meal in the New FoodFaves App (and an Interview!)

We all have our food cravings, that on a given day, can be heightened when we scroll through social. Most food apps work to get food quickly and conveniently to you, but for the most part, that’s it. Most apps don’t know what your food likes and dislikes are or allow you to search for what you are craving (via images) in your area.

Enter the new FoodFaves App, a crowdsourcing tool that finds the best food pic content in your area, using pictures to cue up your food cravings and help you find the best eatery to satisfy that craving. Created by Sydney Epstein, a New York City television editor, who figured out that people respond to pictures of food more than menus or even good reviews. She created her app to be the ultimate personal dining assistant to help people achieve the battle to find the ultimate meal.

This ingenious new app works to identify what you’re craving, find the best possible version of what you’re craving, figure out where to go get it and provides the tools for you to get out of your office/home and be social. To learn more about this app, we chatted with Epstein about how it works and her goals for the app in the future.

Interview with Sydney Epstein about FoodFaves App

Wellness Patterns: How did the idea for the app come about?

Sydney Epstein: I had just graduated from Emerson College and moved across the country to start a new job in Los Angeles. As a food-obsessed millennial, one of the very first things on my “to-do list” upon settling into a new city was to research my new “go-to” restaurants/takeout joints (#priorities). Within the first few minutes of my research, my computer screen became flooded with endless tabs of yelp pages, websites and reviews, and it was impossible to comprehend/keep track of which restaurants matched/catered to my personal taste. That was when I had that “there’s got to be a better way” moment and the idea for Foodfaves was born: an app that’s not just a personal dining assistant, but a “personal portal” to the foodie community!

Wellness Patterns: Tell us more about how it works?

Sydney Epstein: FoodFaves was designed as a personal dining assistant with a visual-heavy interface that capitalizes on cultural trends in how people seek to satisfy hunger. There’s an emphasis on convenience and reliance on digital media and smartphones in everyday decision-making.

FoodFaves offers several features to help users “organize” their food preferences, their favorite restaurants and dishes, while encouraging them to try new foods. Its core feature is a unique “Crave Quiz” that presents the user with sequential photos of delicious dishes based on their preferences and location, interpreting user responses (swipes) to each photo to determine what will satisfy their crave. Using the user’s Crave Quiz results, the app matches the user to a local restaurant that serves their crave. Think of the FoodFaves app as an intelligent “Tinder of Food.”

Through other FoodFaves features, you can easily thumb through pictures of your favorite dishes, or pictures people share with you that all appear in your personal newsfeed. Scroll through your favorite restaurants and menus with the option to save restaurant profiles that catch your eye and revisit them later. Found that perfect meal or snack? Share them with your followers while discovering delicious dishes and treats from others in the FoodFaves community.

Sydney Epstein: FoodFaves is a picture intensive application that capitalizes on the growing cultural attraction to visual images of food, often referred to as “food porn.” It’s digitizing a daily thought process that we all have, in order to reveal your craving. FoodFaves is made up of features which were all designed to help direct users to the restaurant most likely to “match” their craving within their desired location radius. Our app is a unique product with competitive differentiation in a market whose potential lies in its enormity, fascination with food, and increasing reliance on technology.

Wellness Patterns: What has been the response like so far?

Sydney Epstein: User feedback has been extremely positive, mainly about how it’s crazy that this idea has never been done before! Our FoodFaves database of users and food image uploads continues to grow every day. There are currently 30,000 tagged photos of dishes from restaurants all over the country (even some from overseas) uploaded to our app. The majority of food photos uploaded within the app are of dishes served in and around New York City, as that is our first test city. However, more and more food photos are posted every day of dishes served all across the U.S. Many of our users also run successful foodie Instagram accounts, so they came to the FoodFaves app as food influencers. But what is great about FoodFaves is that anyone can be a food micro-influencer within their own social circle. It’s the perfect forum for these users to not only show off drool-worthy dishes, but help other users discover new restaurants in their area! And obviously restaurants greatly benefit too, from the social sharing component of their dishes.

Wellness Patterns: What are some of your goals for the app?

Sydney Epstein: To be a leader in the social media-driven universe of food. FoodFaves provides a feature-rich program that creates unique appeal among users seeking convenience, while providing the restaurant community an easy, cost efficient means of targeted advertising. For restaurants, its visual advertising with a key social component. In addition to bringing users and restaurants together in commerce, we hope the application will provide an active social media forum for users who wish to share food photos with each other, and restaurants who seek to leverage social media for advertising. At the end of the day, our main mission is for FoodFaves to help users search for the perfect answer to satisfy their cravings and where to find it, by digitizing a daily conversation we all have – “What do I (we) want to eat today/tonight?”